Hey fellow techies, does anybody out there still have, or know where I can get, a utility cd for an Asus A8V-E SE motherboard? It's a Socket 939 from circa 2005/2006. Long story short, the system locked up right as the Asus update utility said "Erasing EEPROM." That's never a good thing. It locked at the instant I got the erasing eeprom message, so I had a glimmer of hope, however it apparently erased at least the beginning of the EEPROM. I'm guessing the beginning of the bios image may be somewhat important, you know, cpu initialization routines and what not.<start rant/> Luckily, Asus, in their infinite wisdom put the CrashFree BIOS2 feature on this motherboard to allow you to recover a corrupted BIOS. All you have to do is boot from the motherboard utility cd and it will automatically recover the BIOS. Only problem is I can not find my cd, and Asus doesn't have one either. After being insulted repeatedly by tech support, such as "make sure computer is plugged in," and making them aware of the CrashFree BIOS2 feature, I finally got the answer that they don't have any way to get a copy of the cd. The back and forth dialog with tech support would be hilarious if it wasn't so frustrating. Here's a short excerpt of what I wrote:

"Thank you for your reply. The Asus Update utility caused the computer to lock up *DURING * the bios update process, and as a result the bios is corrupted. I have triedclearing the cmos as well as reinserting only necessary components and thesystem will not post. In the manual it states that if the bios becomes corrupted it canbe recovered by putting the motherboard utility cd in the drive. The motherboard hasthe ability to boot from the utility cd and reflash the corrupted bios according to themanual. This is the CrashFree BIOS2 feature that is advertised on the productfeature page here http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_So ... 9/A8VE_SE/This is what it says:

"ASUS CrashFree BIOS2The CrashFree BIOS2 feature now includes the BIOS auto-recovery function in asupport CD. Users can reboot their system through the support CD when a bootabledisk is not available, and go through the simple BIOS auto-recovery process. ASUSmotherboards now enable users to enjoy this protection feature without the need topay for an optional ROM. "

I can not find my motherboard support cd that is needed to recover the bios. I wouldbe happy to burn the cd myself if you can send me a cd image file, such as .iso, oryou can mail me a copy of the support cd."

I would have gladly paid a few extra dollars for the optional ROM <end rant/>Any help would be appreciated. I don't want to scrap the system as it still ran older games ok with an Athlon 64X2 4400+, Radeon 5770, and Corsair XMS3200LLPT memory.

Thanks for the replies everybody. No it doesn't post, and I did try to clear the cmos. Apparently this motherboard has some type of logic, probably an asic that's also related to the voltage and temp monitor, that can access the atapi and floppy interfaces before POST, and look for a specific boot image to recover a corrupted BIOS. They call it the CrashFree BIOS2 feature. The only problem is you have to have the motherboard utility cd to boot from, and mine is missing.

that can access the atapi and floppy interfaces before POST, and look for a specific boot image to recover a corrupted BIOS. They call it the CrashFree BIOS2 feature. The only problem is you have to have the motherboard utility cd to boot from, and mine is missing.

So how would you be able to boot to a CD if it doesn't POST?

Did some research, and if it won't POST, the program/disc will do nothing for you. This thread discusses how the software works, and how it won't work for your situation.

Still way too early to give up and consider RMA. I'm sure I have a floppy drive that works in my parts somewhere. Next step is to try to find a floppy disk that works, fire up the 486 and make a dos boot disk with the flash utility on it, and see if it will boot from that. I'm also going to see if the bios is socketed when I get a chance to work on this. If it is socketed, it's getting pulled and flashed externally. Back in '03 when I worked as a computer tech I did an experiment where I took a corrupted bios chip and hot-swapped it into a running motherboard and successfully re-flashed it. I guess if bios shadowing is enabled and the code is running from ram instead of rom it doesn't need the bios chip after booting. I just have to see if I have a motherboard that has a compatible socket. Otherwise I'm sure I can find somebody in the Ann Arbor area that can flash an EEPROM (I knew I should have gotten one of those universal EEPROM flashers on ebay and learned how to use it).

@TheEmrys - Great link, but that basically contradicts what the manual says about the feature. The system does still poll the cd-rom drives, causing the access lights to blink, for about 10 seconds whenever it's powered on. This is not the normal cd-rom internal initialization routine that they will do when they are powered on. The motherboard has always done this. I believe this is some type of special logic, that is either independent of the cpu, or has enough code to initialize very basic system functionality, that is looking for the motherboard utility cd.